Cheap hobiest console dev kit.

Sounds good to me, I''d like to try my hand at console programming as a hobiest before commiting to it, even if it was for the SNES.

I''m surprised their aren''t more people interested! Come on people, if you want to be able to dev for consoles, without having to pay and arm and a leg, lets start by getting the big N to let us do the older system, and then start showing them that us little dev''rs can do some good stuff, and maybe they''ll decide that they want us on their side.

COME ON! Show your support! If we can get enough of us rounded up, we can do it!

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Drakonite

[Insert Witty Signature Here]

That''s the spirit! Let''s get this thing going! But a 3 people brigade isn''t going to do it! Come on people! We need to hear support before we can go ahead with the plan! I haven''t seen a post with 500+ replies for quite some time, let''s break that record!

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Drakonite

[Insert Witty Signature Here]

hey its me the anon... haha i remembered my username!!!! aright time to get this devkit thing on.. how do we do it? we need to get this topic heard so people read it... and we need an email address to nintendo! haha if there is enough people on our side we could win!... i say we get important people (maybe some of the admins here that have written books?) to help that way we will have some sorta voice.

i''m in

X4J

Sounds interesting, I''m all for it!

Waassaap!!

Sony might, since they already had that Net Yaroze thingy. That SNES idea ain''t bad, seeing as they no longer seem to be working on that handheld SNES system anymore (dammit!). I''m not sure how eager they''d be to start making dev kits for 15 hobbyists though, unless you mean older dev kits that are just kicking around anyway. And many companies put more weight on snail mail than e-mail, so you may want to send both.

Chris Barry

hey uh game boy advance? practically same thing, with free compilers/emulators over the internet. eh?

If you use Linux, you can develop for Dreamcast for not much more than the cost of the system itself. There was an article about it on this website a while ago.

im in too just give me the emial adress

I''m in. Give me an E-mail address. Oh and by the way, have someone post news on the front of GameDev, saying "Help out to Buy Cheap SNES Dev kits..., or something of the like. Everyone will see it there and want to help. An idea to speed things up.

Wonderfull! Support seems to be arriving!

Posting news is a good idea about, anybody wanna make a good news post?

Yes, gba is good, and nearly the same, however I beleive we will be much more likely to be successfull at a system that is past it''s life span, and not at the begining.
However, gba would be a good dev kit to get, as a good amature game could theoretically reach production...

The plan is to have a near identical letter sent from a large group of people, hopfully we can make this letter so it seems we would be interested in things such as gba also.

And yes, we dont'' want to rule out sony. The psx was a more powerfull system than SNES, and it''s games will continue to have a market (ps2...). I''ve heard that it was horrible to program for, but an official dev kit and documentation should ease that a lot.

Parhaps we should send letters to both companies, and express are desire to create amature games on these systems. It may also help our cause some if they both knew we were asking both companies.

Snail-mail vs. e-mail..... Yes, snail mail probably would be more effective. I am sure we can obtain the email from somewhere, and the snail mail too... (BTW, if anybody happens to have the best place to send this, please let me know.) It may be to our advantage to all send email, with a note at the bottom saying "For your convinience, we have also sent a hard copy of this letter to your office."

The fight of numbers... Well, if 15 people mail in and ask, they would probably not be very willing to produce more. However if they had 15 old kits lying around we could most likely work something out. If we get many more people, they may be willing to produce some dev kits, or maybe be convinced to provide GBA kits...

I offer this additional idea... If we inquire about the GBA parhaps we can work out an agreement to create cheap dev kits, in return and quality games we create and would like to sell will be sold through them, thus allowing us to receive cheap kits while they will still get large amounts of royalties on any games produced.

Due to the nature of things, a GBA dev kit will probably be thousands of dollars no matter what we do, so they might not be as good of a target.

Sony however, may be a great target for this low-cost dev kit plan in which any game that wishes to go comercial, they would be guarenteed to be the productucers of and would get a sizeable portion of the profit (with of course, a guarenteed percentage they would have to offer the dev''rs)if the chose to produce the game.

Well, these are my ideas, everybody respond and let me know what you think!

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Drakonite

[Insert Witty Signature Here]

Sounds good. Give me an email adress and im in.

Edited by - 69with7of9 on July 21, 2001 7:33:00 PM

I''ll go for a SNES SDK. That sounds like tons of fun!

-Rich

In order to make this more structured, along with any posts you make here to bump this up the list please email me once at drakonite@yahoo.com so I can collect who all is participating, and include the following information:

Name
Email address
Amount you would be willing to pay for a SNES dev kit
What type of programming you have currently done
Anything special that would make you stand out (i.e. Maybe you manage a site called gamedev, or you have released a pc game that sold lots of copies)


and any other information you feel important. I will use this information to help design the letter to be sent, and to figure out how many particapants there will be. Thank you all for your support.

Any GDNet staff interested?

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Drakonite

[Insert Witty Signature Here]

Edited by - Drakonite on July 21, 2001 7:58:59 PM

I''m definitely interested...

Cool,
Count me in.

PaladinGLT

Hi Guys,

I hate to be the one to do this but I''d rather let you know.

I work as a programmer for a games company and I really doubt Sony will let you have cut price dev kits.

The way the proper dev kits work is like this...

Sony have built both CD and Hard drive emulators which you put into your PC, the CD emulator is an ISA slot card which has specific DOS tools etc. The problem is they still are charging developers an arm and a leg for this stuff even though the Psone is 5-6 years old now, to give you an idea, this emulator on the official developers site is near 1500 pounds.

I would definetly try with the SNES stuff, but I think the GBA is too close to the SNES and the Big N might be a little scared of allowing hobbyist to get their hands on ''em

I know its always worth a try..so good luck guys

i would like to get a dev kit for psx, but probably not for SNES. I really wanna stick to a 32 bit platform. i think a an idea that would really interest nintendo/sony is that if they offer these cheap dev kits, or more support for home brewed dev kits, then they would have more potential developers for the next-gen systems if they like their old ones. Im sure that would really warm them up the the idea, since its a chance for them to get more business. Ill bet they''ll release an educational license for the dev kits as long as nothing commercial as done, and this would help both us freelancers and nintendo/sony